Ember Data - Mastering async relationships part 1

Although I have achieved quite a bit of work alongside Ember.js, Ember Data is a whole new world; a world of wonders for sure, but still another big step toward full mastering of the Ember framework.

I have to confess that Ember Data’s (ED) async relationships gave me a hard time. It was worth the pain though, as soon as you understand how those relationships work it will get a lot easier to achieve almost anything (model-related) with a better granularity.

This post will cover the bootstrapping of the application and the first interaction (read) with an async relationship. The next post will be about modifying (write) an async relationship and syncing it with the server.

Requirements

To follow this blog post, you need a basic understanding of how Ember.js and Ember Data work, if you want to discover those framework with a simpler project, you can read this post.
You’ll also need the ember-cli toolbelt installed, you can find all the instructions here.

Get the bootstrapped app

The bootstrapped app is available here. You’ll need it to go through the steps of this tutorial (mostly for the server-side code). Once you’ve downloaded it, process with the classic ‘npm install && bower install’. Then ‘ember server’ to start the whole thing.

Context

For this blog post, we’re going to create a simple project management app that will contain the following screens:

The dashboard: Display all projects attached to the ‘currentUser’ (‘index’ route)

The project description: Show one project and its description (‘projects/:id’ route)

The project participants: Display ‘participants’ of this project (‘projects/:id/participants’ route)

Models

We’ll need 2 models to create this product:

The User model

The Project model

User model

We’ll first generate the User model as we’ll need it as a relationship in our Project model. To achieve that you need to enter this command in your terminal (the ‘g’ stands for ‘generate’):

$ ember g model User name:string

This will create a model in app/models/user.js with the default property ‘name’ and a test in tests/unit/models/user-test.js.

Why are we going async on the ‘participants’ relationship?

Using an async relationship inside a model lets the Ember app only fetch the data it needs depending on which route it is on. As we’ll see in this post, the ‘participants’ array is not needed until we actually reach the ‘project.participants’ route.

The nice thing is that we can still define all the relationships belonging to a model and then fetch each relationship once it is needed.

What exactly is ‘participants’ on the Project model?

The async relationship behave the same as a computed property. As long as you do not use it, it remains ‘not calculated’ and as soon as you use it (on a template or inside a function) it gets ‘calculated’ and you gain access to its value.

The dashboard screen

The ‘index’ route

When we’ll want to display our projects on the dashboard screen, we’ll need to fetch them through the model hook of our ‘index’ route. Let’s go ahead and generate this route:

$ ember g route index

This command will create the ‘index’ route, its template and its test file. We now need to fetch the projects from the model hook:

There’s no difference in structure for when you fetch them through async relations, the difference is that both arrays do not have to get there at the same time. For our example, loading the ‘index’ route will only require:

{projects:[{id:1,participants:[1,2]}]}

and then once we need to display the ‘participants’ of the project:

{users:[{id:1,name:'Bruce'},{id:2,name:'Tom'}]}

Once fetched they will be associated with their project.

The template

Now let’s display our projects on the index template, go to /templates/index.hbs and insert the following code:

Incoming payload

The model hook will make a call to ‘GET /api/projects/1’ and render the template.

The template

Go to /templates/projects.hbs and insert the following code:

{{#with model}}
<h1>{{title}}</h1><p>{{description}}</p>
{{/with}}

We now have the project displaying on its correct URL!

The project participants screen

This screen will appear beneath the title and description of the project inside the {{outlet}} of templates/project.hbs

The ‘project.participants’ route

Let’s generate our ‘participants’ template:

$ ember g template participants

Only this time we’ll need to change a couple of things. First we need to move the participants template to templates/project/participants.hbs and then change the Router’s ‘project’ resource so that it looks like this:

That way, participants is nested inside the ‘project’ route and we can display it in the ‘project’ outlet.

The template

The template is quite simple, we are just calling the ‘participants’ property from the parent’s route’s model.

<ul>
{{#each model.participants}}
<li>{{name}}</li>
{{/each}}
</ul>

Once the template reaches the property ‘model.participants’ it will ask the store to ‘GET /api/users?ids[]=2&ids[]=3&ids[]=4’ (IDs sent by the server inside the ‘Project’ model previously).

And this is the crucial point: the async relationship ‘participants’ is triggered, the ajax call made and the actual participants fetched and returned all the way to the template.

Incoming payload

As we saw before, here is what is returned by the server:

{users:[{id:1,name:'Bruce'},{id:2,name:'Tom'}]}

At that point we correctly display the participants of the project. If you go back to the description screen (by clicking ‘show description’ on the project page) you’ll get back to the project index page, if you click again on ‘show participants’, participants will be shown but no call ajax will be made. They are now ‘cached’.